HOW TO PRODUCE KICK-ASS IDEASSTOP WASTING TIME BY MAKING YOUR MEETINGS MORE PRODUCTIVE

Flickr Image: @ bertboerland

The quality of your output will directly be influenced by the quality of the input.

This presentation will guide you in how to prepare for and conduct ideation sessions. Let’s get started…

Let’s get a few things straight before we begin.

Brainstorming is not:

1. Getting people to sit in a boardroom and asking them what they think. That’s brain-dumping.

2. About free-form ideas. Contrary to popular belief it does not work better when there is no process or parameters. That’s wasting time.

3. About generating lots of random ideas. What’s the point of having lots of ideas that don’t solve your problem? That’s counter-productive.

COMPETITIVE SCAN

DISTILL RESEARCH

EMPATHY MAPS

PROTOTYPE

THE BRAINSTORM PROCESS

WHAT THE ?DF?!?@ I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS. THIS LOOKS LIKE A LOT OF WORK.

CALM DOWN. YOU’LL SEE IT REALLY ISN’T…

INSIGHTS IDEATE

Competitive Scan

How do you conduct a competitive scan?

- Look for examples from within the category and outside of it- Use industry tools to help pull information quickly

- Present your competitive review using the following different tools…

Lay your findings out on a wall or on craft paper. Mark all the category conventions that you see within the industry

Use a strategy canvas to represent your competitive scan. The horizontal axis maps key dimensions the category competes on and the vertical axis shows where each competitor plays. Find examples to support

each point on the value curve.

GE WHAT WORKS MATRIX

List all the steps involved in solving the problem you are brainstorming around

Show examples of different companies who have solved that specific step

Record what you find on the matrix.When you find a combination that seems to solve your problem, study it

further to see exactly what your source did in order to succeed.

Distill Research

Can come from many different sources

Existing from client3rd Party – i.e. Forrester ReportsConducted on your own

A few guidelines:

- Distill research down into a context document. - Goal of the document is to provide a condensed format for the entire group to read through and understand the most salient facts.

- Document should be no longer than 2 pages.

Empathy Maps

In order to create meaningful change you have to find the feeling. It starts with having a true empathy for your customers.

Enter Empathy Maps.

How to Create Kick-Ass Empathy Maps

1. Populate each of the quadrants in the empathy map template with questions

2. Highlight any assumptions that the team wants to explore further

3. Go out in the field and interview the target audience to fill out the empathy map (use one map for each respondent)

4. Review all of the empathy maps and look for areas of commonality and divergence

5. 7 – 10 people is a good number of interviews for your purposes. Remember this is not meant to be statistically relevant. It’s about finding the feeling.

Consumer Journey Wheels

Once you have your empathy mapsyou may want to present your findings in a way the larger team can quickly understand.

Enter Consumer Journey Wheels.

Map out each stage of the consumer journey using happy, sad and neutral emoticons to show the different states from the consumer’s perspective.

The process so far should now help you avoid the most common mistake – TRUE BUT USELESS (TBU) INSIGHTS.

HHI = $75,000Target Audience = Busy Mom, Multi-Tasking

TBU!

If your brainstorm briefs are filled with this type of information you’re wasting your time and won’t get great ideas – remember the quality of your inputs is

directly correlated with the output.

INSIGHTS

COMPETITIVE SCAN

DISTILL RESEARCH

EMPATHY MAPS

Using your competitive scan, any research you’ve distilled, and findings from the empathy maps develop a list of 3 – 5 insights.

At this stage you want to re-group with your core team and go through all of your findings and insights.

Idea Generation Time.

What you will need: 1. A stopwatch – every activity must be timed2. Sharpies – no pencils or pens, you don’t want to sketch details

at this stage3. Insights that you will form ideas around4. Activities

You’re going to generate ideas around a very specific problem and use the insights you’ve compiled to explore different solutions.

Conducting the Session.

Reveal the core problem everyone will be focusing on. Reveal one of the insights that you want people to think about.

For example, we are going to focus on improving the grocery shopping experience (problem) because shoppers hate searching for products in aisles (insight).

Next, use one of the following tools to think/sketch/design ideas…

If you don’t know Leah Buley, you should. She’s amazing. Find templates like this one on her personal sitehttp://www.ugleah.com//Work.asp

DESIGN THE BOX. What would your solution look like if it was a product? What would you say on the front and back?

Template from:http://www.ugleah.com//Work.asp

Sketch out your concept – describe what it’s like and what it does.

(Don’t forget to time each exercise. A good time for everyone to sketch is about 5 minutes).

SKETCH.

Stephen Harper Lady Gaga

Novice Tech Savvy

Individual Social

SPECTURMS.Sketch your ideas at different extremes. What would your solution look like if you were designing it for a novice vs. a tech savvy person?

What would your concept’s coming soon page look like? What are the benefits? What the most important thing you would want to communicate?

COMING SOON PAGE.

Check out unbounce.com or launchrock.com for examples of coming soon pages.

BUILD. Use brainstorm cards to build on ideas or explore solutions from different perspectives.

Check out mentalnotes.com for a set of 50 awesome insights based on psychology to help focus your thinking.

LOW FIDELITY PROTOTYPES.Group the ideas from the brainstorm with your core team.

Quickly prototype these ideas using the following tools.

The goal of prototyping at this stage is to have a physical representation of your ideas so that you can show them to your team, clients, target audience and get feedback.

Check out these two presentations from Travis Isaacs on Slideshare and get his templates. http://www.slideshare.net/tbisaacshttp://travisisaacs.com/

Use Google SketchUp to quickly sketch product ideas

Use Unbounce to develop web ideas

COMPETITIVE SCAN

DISTILL RESEARCH

EMPATHY MAPS

PROTOTYPE

THE BRAINSTORM PROCESS

I promise it will help you avoid looking at each other with blank stares in a boardroom because seriously, nobody enjoys that.

INSIGHTS IDEATE

THANKS FOR READING. collidelabs.com | nish@collidelabs.com